Dissident Voice

September
6, 2003

During
the Cold War, the CIA, in the words of long-time agent Ralph McGehee, practiced
the art of "deadly deceits." Throughout the Third World, the secret
spy agency engaged in covert operations, blatant acts of economic
destabilization and wanton acts of mass violence.

In
the 1970s, Idaho Senator Frank Church's investigatory committee established
that the CIA also engaged in so-called "benign" operations including
rigging elections. The agency used the term "demonstration elections"
- elections that are superficially democratic but the results manipulated by
the CIA.

The
Company did everything from stuffing ballot boxes, creating political parties,
merging smaller political parties into large coalitions as in UNO in Nicaragua,
paying death squads to intimidate voters and the occasional use of computer
fraud. In the mid-80s, the Reagan and Bush administration used a computer to
help their "man in Panama" and CIA asset Manuel Noriega gain
electoral support; they backed dictator Ferdinand Marcos when he brought in the
pre-programmed election tapes in the middle of an election to turn his sure
defeat into a fixed victory. The people of the Philippines didn't accept the
computer results as credible, but Reagan and Bush argued it was necessary to
preserve our "traditional" relationship with the brutal dictator. Remember,
his political opponent, Senator Aquino was shot to death after disembarking
from an airplane to run against Marcos.

Now
that we have the son of the former CIA director as President, we should
recognize that the more reprehensible tactics of the CIA have been brought home
with the Bush dynasty. What George Bush's energy friends from Texas, including
Enron, did to the California economy through the massive "mega-watt"
laundering of energy should be viewed as just another economic destabilization
of an enemy regime.

In
the Houston area, two Republican U.S. representatives were declared winners in
the last election until it was discovered that the results were caused by a
"faulty" and Republican-friendly microchip. When the proper chip was
installed in the computerized voting machine the correct results were revealed
- two Democratic victories.

The
2000 Florida election included all of the signs of a Third World CIA
demonstration election. Bizarrely constructed butterfly ballots, obscure third
parties receiving unexplained and unfathomable votes and heavily Jewish areas
voting unexpectedly for right-wing nationalistic anti-Semitic candidates like
Pat Buchanan. Remember that the exit polls predicted that Gore would win. Only
when the psych-ops operation at Fox News changed that call did some people
begin to believe in the myth of the Bush victory.

What
began as covert operations in the Third World are now overt practices by the
Bush administration in the United States.

Take
for example the August 14 letter from Walden O'Dell, Chief Executive of
Diebold, Inc., pledging that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its
votes to the President next year." Diebold is one of three finalists
currently seeking $100 million contract with the state of Ohio to provide computerized
voting machines for the 2004 elections. Diebold has worked on its computers
with Battelle, a well-established collaborator with the U.S. military and CIA.
Computer scientists from John Hopkins indicated that it would be relatively
easy to hack into and manipulate the computer voting results in these machines.

The
Seattle Times ran a feature story on Diebold in their August 21 edition. Bev
Harris, a Seattle-area public relations company owner, recently uncovered
"some 4000 files that included user manuals, source code and an executable
files for voting machines made by Diebold, a corporation based in North Canton,
Ohio."

So,
what do we have here other than the obvious denial by mainstream America? We've
got a CIA family, their corporate supporters working with CIA contractors at
Battelle in order to bring flawed electronic voting to the U.S. with no paper
trails and questionable exit polls. Recall that Battelle was also the
contractor for Voter News Service (VNS) and failed to produce exit polls for the
2002 Congressional election.

Factor
in the reality that, out of 435 Congressional districts in the U.S., only 39,
or 9%, are actually competitive (when major party candidates won with less than
55% of the vote). Under our political system, also, the vast majority of
Congressional seats are gerrymandered as "safe" or noncompetitive
districts by the party that controls the state government. Eleven Texas
Democrats are hiding out in New Mexico in hopes of thwarting another round of
Republican district-rigging in their state. So little democracy is actually
left.

Over
the years, well-known and respected political theorists and leaders have warned
of the rise of authoritarianism. In the 50s, U.S. President Eisenhower warned
of the "military-industrial complex." C. Wright Mills detailed the "power
elite" - the convergence of the top levels of the military, corporations
and governmental leaders during the Cold War. In the 60s, Herbert Marcuse, who
worked for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in WWII, pointed out that
Americans' inability to think critically was making us a
"one-dimensional" society with an authoritarian culture. In the 70s,
political scientists like William Domhoff and Thomas Dye began to document
empirically the undemocratic and elitist nature of the U.S. political system.
In the 80s, Bertrand Gross warned of the rise of "friendly fascism."
In the 90s, William Grieder documented that the U.S. had the best democracy
money can buy and asked the question, "Who will tell the people?"

But
the most damning and lasting testimony that foretold the rise of America's new
authoritarian demonstration democracy are still the massive volumes produced by
the Church Committee. Back in the late 70s, the Agency's shadowy hands were all
over the Idaho ABC Committee (Anybody but Church). Bush's election coup of
2000, our first obvious CIA-style demonstration election, gave the Bush clan
and their friends in the CIA the opportunity to field test whether or not you
can blatantly steal an election in the U.S. just like Panama or the Philippines.
The 9-11 attacks provided Bush, Jr. with the authority to push U.S. society
massively to the right and pursue militarism and imperialism. It also allowed
Bush to test market neo-Nazi-style mass propaganda to the American public.

The
voting machines are simply the final nail in the people's coffin. The comatose
electorate rests silently as the hammer of authoritarianism falls.

Bob Fitrakis is a Political
Science Professor in the Social and Behavioral Sciences department at Columbus
State Community College, and author of The Idea of Democratic Socialism in
America and the Decline of the Socialist Party (Garland Publishers 1993).
He is the editor of The Free Press, where this article first appeared (www.freepress.org).